Inside the Yakuza | Jake Adelstein | Ep. 375

Investigative journalist Jake Adelstein details his career covering the Japanese criminal underworld, from his early days reporting in Tokyo to the high-stakes confrontation with Yakuza boss Goto Tadamasa that forced him into police protection. The interview thoroughly examines the Yakuza's culture, including the history behind their tattoos and the ritual of the sacrificial finger, and discusses the decline of the crime syndicate in modern Japan. Later, the conversation covers Adelstein's unique projects, such as investigating human trafficking and the Fukushima disaster, before revealing his path to becoming a Zen Buddhist priest. Finally, he introduces his latest book, The Devil Takes Bitcoin, which chronicles the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange collapse. Jake's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Takes-Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Connection-ebook/dp/B0FL8QSK2Y?ref_=ast_author_mpb All of Jake's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jake-Adelstein/author/B002D68IJE?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true Today's Sponsors: Perfect Jean ⬇️ https://theperfectjean.nyc/house15 for 15% off GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 Start 02:38 Adelstein's origin story as a reporter in Tokyo. 08:37 The unique dynamic between police, press, and Yakuza. 18:31 Becoming a target of Yakuza boss Goto Tadamasa. 26:49 Deep dive into Yakuza history and their code of conduct. 31:30 Yakuza cultural symbols: tattoos and the sacrificial finger. 50:13 Continuation of Saigo's story and the messy finger-cutting incident. 1:11:19 Japanese anti-Semitism and the Om Shinrikyo cult. 1:18:52 Work on the U. S. State Department human trafficking study. 1:35:43 Reporting on the Fukushima disaster and Yakuza in the nuclear industry. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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  The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 1:42Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 375 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here tonight with our guest Jake Adelstein. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. This is a book I read way back in 2009. I feel old looking at the date on there this afternoon. He has also written The Last Yakuza: Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld. This is probably the best. I mean, I would say it is the best English-language book about the Yakuza. You guys should go and check this one out. And his follow up to Tokyo Vice, Tokyo Noir, I, which kind of continues Jake's own story

• 2:27Jack Murphy?

  in Japan, in and out of the, out of Japan's underworld. Um, I hope you guys will check this one out also. Um, so Jake, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

• 2:38Speaker 06

  Hey, it's a pleasure to be on your show. Um, I'm, you know, not as grizzled as your usual veterans, but uh, I'll do my best.

• 2:45Jack Murphy?

  Hey, I, I should also mention Tokyo Vice has been turned into a television show with two seasons, uh, that people can go and check out. It's like loosely based on your book, but it's, it's good to wa, it's fun to watch. It's a good show.

• 3:01Speaker 06

  Oh yeah. Thank you. Uh, uh, you know, the, the person who was running the show was my high school buddy. Um, he went up to become a, yeah, yeah. He, he went off to college and he became a very successful actor in New York. Um, and he wrote a lot of plays set in, um, foreign countries, including Afghanistan and, and, uh, in Africa. Um, and you know, he won a, a Tony Award, which I think is a big deal in the world of, of movies and theater for this play about, about the Palestinian peace talks in Oslo called Oslo. Um, and uh, yeah, it's a great play and they made it into a movie

• 3:41Speaker 06

  too. And, um, I asked him to be the showrunner and HBO was like, yes. And so it's great to work with your high school buddy. And he was very good about listening to what I had to say 90% of the time.

• 3:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that's super cool. That came together quite well. Um, so I want to just start off asking you a bit about your own origin story. Um, which kind of you tell in, in Tokyo Vice, but I mean, as I recall, you grew up in the Midwest, Jewish dude from the Midwest and you ended up working as a reporter in Tokyo. Uh, what in, in like the early to mid 1990s, like tell us that whole trajectory from point A to point B, how that came about.

• 4:23Speaker 06

  Okay, okay. Um, yeah, it's a, it's, it's, you know, Columbia, Missouri is an interesting place. I went, I went back there two years ago to do a podcast about a serial killer in the hospital where my father worked. That is a whole other story and an entire podcast. Um, so I grew up there. Uh, my father, uh, has always, well, has spent most of his time at the Harriet Truman Renderns Hospital where he's a pathologist. He's also the, um, medical examiner. So I grew up listening to lots of stories about crime and murder and accidents. And that was kind of always dinner conversation. And, um, in high school, I got kind of picked on a little bit. I got in a fight with the

• 5:07Speaker 06

  school bully and, um, my teacher, instead of expelling me, told me I needed to take karate lessons to channel my anger. And from there, uh, I got interested in Japan. And so my first year as a student at the University of Missouri, um, I noticed that they had an exchange program and I thought, what a wonderful opportunity to go to Japan. And lucky for me, it was a time like when the Japanese economy was booming and Japan seemed very expensive. So we had no one going from the University of Missouri and we had 20 people coming from Sophia University, which is the university where I was going to go as an exchange student. And, um, they relaxed the rules and let me go after only a year

• 5:52Speaker 06

  of Japanese under my belt. And a couple of months after I got there, um,

• 5:59Speaker 06

  I ended up living in a Zen Buddhist temple. It's not really weird story. I mean, there's kind of one coincidence after another. And, uh, I'm still friends with the chief priest. I mean, you know, and you read the book where now he's my Zen master, which is kind of a weird thing to say.

• 6:17Jack Murphy?

  And so from there, that's how you kind of got immersed in Japanese culture and the Japanese language and kind of continued from there?

• 6:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was full immersion, right? Because you're in, you're in a, you know, I'm living in this temple, I'm living surrounded by Japanese people and I'm going to school all the time. And I thought, you know, if I'm going to really improve my Japanese, if I'm really going to get better before I graduate, that I should do something that would force me to work hard. And so I decided to study for the newspaper entrance examinations, which are something in Japan that newspapers do. They hire you by examination.

• 6:57Jack Murphy?

  And I gotta ask, was this like a bit of like youthful hubris that you're like, I'm some white kid from the Midwest, I'm gonna just jump right in and take the entrance exam for a prestigious Japanese newspaper?

• 7:12Speaker 06

  Um, you know, it's, there's a saying in Japanese that even a stupid person can do one thing right. So, um, you know, I had some talent for Japanese and also I am, you know, I hate to admit it's such a contrarian that once I decided to do it and people told me that it would never happen, I was just like, well, I'll see. So that was that.

• 7:38Jack Murphy?

  So you went and, uh, and took the test and got the job. I mean, did they know they were hiring an American when they blessed off on it? Like,

• 7:50Speaker 06

  Um, you know, the Omideshibo used to be the world's largest newspaper. I mean, it had 11 million readers a day at the time when everyone in Japan was reading a newspaper. Most of the readers are Japanese, of course, right? Um, and they, they wanted to internationalize themselves. And so, you know, they had a, the question, the essay topic, we have to write an essay was, you know, foreigners, sky Gokuchi. So I wrote this essay. It was like, if you're serious about internationalizing and you really, you know, uh, and you know, you're giving us the topic of foreigners, you should hire foreigners. So you have a different perspective on things. And, um, they took me up on that. So to their credit, you know, they knew exactly what they were doing. They did have, they did it just like in the TV series. They didn't have some questions on whether me being nominally Jewish would

• 8:35Speaker 06

  be an obstacle to me working.

• 8:39Jack Murphy?

  But they didn't really care.

• 8:42Speaker 06

  No, no, no. I mean, I mean, if I had been smart, I would say, you know, I shouldn't have said like, you know, yeah, I have to have the Sabbath off because then I might have actually gotten some vacation time on the job. But I didn't.

• 8:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I don't think they have Rosh Hashanah as a national holiday in Japan.

• 9:00Speaker 06

  No, I mean, I don't, I don't think, you know,

• 9:05Speaker 06

  I'll tell you what, like, you know, I'm not, I'm just don't, I'm not complaining. This is just how things are in Japan as they used to be. So we had, as news reports, especially on the crime beat, we had like 80 hour weeks, 90 hour weeks, sometimes depending on what was the news breaking. And, um, you know, they would give you a calendar with your days marked off on it. And, and, you know, and you would almost never get those days off. And then as I rose up in the company, sometimes you'd be on the night shift and you'd be following the formula to mark your labor hours. So I went once to the company, I hadn't, I had been like in the office for three days, working on a story, manning the phones. And I marked myself in like in the middle of a vacation because that's what the manual said.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  It's pretty crazy.

• 9:54Jack Murphy?

  Uh, and as you become a reporter in Japan, I feel like this is kind of like where you get taken into the next level of the immersion. Like you start to interact with obviously the press, but also the police, you're kind of on the metro beat, right? So you're interacting with the police and eventually organized crime. You're starting to learn sort of like where the fault lines in society are. Like, like, what was that like? And what were you learning as a, as a young guy working that job at the time?

• 10:24Speaker 06

  First of all, what was really different for me is that I, I didn't drink. I mean, you know, I didn't drink in college. I was like a straight edge punk and, um, and, and I'm living in this Zen Buddhist temple where, you know, you, you can drink, it's a Zen Buddhist, but you're not supposed to get drunk. And the, the first thing I realized is you have to drink with the cops. If you don't drink with the cops, they don't take you seriously.

• 10:50Jack Murphy?

  And there's sort of like this interesting relationship between the police and the press and the criminals and the way you kind of like have to balance that as a reporter working in that environment.

• 11:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, because everybody has their part to play, right? And, you know, when you're first starting off to the cops, you're just a nuisance, right? You're, you know, if they like you, maybe they'll feed you a story. And in the Yakuza, you know, if they talk to you at all, it's when they realize that you might be able to write a story that would do damage to their enemies. So they might feed you a good story. I mean, that was a really weird thing that I realized is, as the rules of engagement as a journalist, especially covering organized crime were like this. You could get information from the Yakuza and you could pass it on to the police. And that was okay.

• 11:45Speaker 06

  You just had to make sure that the Yakuza, where these mafiosos understood, that you understood that you were doing them a favor and it wasn't the other way around. And then, but you could never take information you got from the police and give it to the Yakuza. And so everyone has these kind of sort of rules and they're not written out and you sort of warn them as you go along. You don't want to screw up. And, and, and what makes being a police reporter in Japan really hard is the cops cannot go on the record.

• 12:16Speaker 06

  Because the Japan criminal, because the Japan Public Service Law makes it a crime for a police officer to speak about something that's confidential. So if they get caught, they can get fired, they can even be prosecuted, which is why you have to have this pretense of you and I are just drinking and we both got so drunk, no one remembers what happened last night. So of course you couldn't have told me anything about a breaking case.

• 12:41Jack Murphy?

  And as I recall, there is also some interesting conventions with the newspaper and with the editors. Obviously, they have journalistic standards, things have to be sourced properly. But there's also like, oh, do we really want to piss off the cops by publishing that? Do we want to really piss off the Yakuza by publishing that? They have to balance some of these things as well.

• 13:02Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, the balance with the cops is really hard.

• 13:07Speaker 06

  You know, there was, there was this one interesting case in which, you know, I don't know about the cops in the United States, but the cops in Japan are very jurisdictional, right? So everybody has their fiefdom. So if there's a homicide case, the homicide cops want to do it. Well, there was one case where they, the homicide cases, homicide cops took over a case from the organized crime squad involving the murder of a, of a lowlife journalist, actually. I mean, one of our own in a sense, but basically he made his money by blackmailing people. He got paid by not writing articles. So this, you know, Yakuza kills him. The police started an investigation, first the organized crime cops do it, then the homicide guys step in and say, we're gonna do, we're gonna do this.

• 13:51Speaker 06

  So the homicide cops send like low level rookies to arrest the guy. But the suspect has a gun, right? Because he's a Yakuza, only the Yakuza have guns in Japan, unless they're cops. And so when the cops show up to arrest him, not knowing what's going on, he pulls the gun on him and he holds him hostage in a car for a couple of hours. It's a standoff and shoots himself in the head. He survives. It's a huge scandal, but it's just, the whole thing is screwed up because the homicide guys had so much hubris that they wouldn't listen to the organized crime cops. And they didn't tell the rookies going to arrest him, the possible danger that he had a gun. So I thought this is a great story.

• 14:31Speaker 06

  Here's where police rivalry results in, you know, nearly a death and a hostage situation that could have been avoided. And so I wrote up the article and I showed it to my boss and what do you think happened?

• 14:45Jack Murphy?

  Said, uh, nope.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  No, no. He said, "Hold on, this is a great story." So he went to talk to the head of the investigative division, like the chief of the detectives, and they made a deal that we would have a scoop on any major crime story for the next six months, and in exchange, we would bury this story. We did bury the story.

• 15:08Jack Murphy?

  I, I think those types of arrangements exist in the American press with the big newspapers more than anyone would be comfortable saying out loud, quite frankly.

• 15:20Jack Murphy?

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• 18:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I can't say that I miss it that much, but there was something kind of fun about going to, going to evening rounds. You actually go to the cops' houses. You drink with them, right? And the organized crime guys were fun. I mean, because they did crazy cases. They're dealing with these violent criminals. And they tended to be pretty nutty themselves.

• 19:10Speaker 06

  And because like, as I told you, the pretense is right that this is just a friendly drink between buddies, right? So you cannot take notes. You know, you cannot take out a pen and paper. So you drink, you know, for a couple of hours, maybe, maybe you eat something too. And you always try and bring something with you. And then we had taxis that we could use like company cars, because of course we don't want to get arrested for drunk driving. So you'd have to write down everything as fast as you can before you pass out or while it's still in your head. I mean, it's great training for remembering conversations because you can't take notes. So there's one cop I really liked named Isobesan.

• 19:55Speaker 06

  And, you know, he's retired now, so and he doesn't have a problem with mentioning his name.

• 20:00Speaker 06

  And when I go to Isobesan, the first thing he would say was like, would you like a beer? And that's very common in Japan is you start with a beer. And then we would do drinks in Japanese sake. He was really into sake. So he would tell me where it was from and whether it was dry or whether it was sweet. You know, what its name was and why this was a good sake. And then after the sake, sometimes his wife would make us dinner and we would have some wine with the dinner. And if it was winter, he'd give me a shot of whiskey for the road because it was cold outside. And so my notes from my visits to his house would always like start with very nice, you know, fine print and detail. But by the third page, you're off and you start trailing off as I pass out.

• 20:46Speaker 06

  But that was kind of fun.

• 20:49Jack Murphy?

  And at this point, you're like, you're young too. You're like, what, like 25 or something?

• 20:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, 25, 26.

• 20:57Jack Murphy?

  It's awesome. So let's, um, there, there's a whole bunch of things that I want to get into with you. But maybe this would be the right place to sort of jump off and ask you about Saigo. And how you met him and how, how that kind of relationship came about for you.

• 21:20Speaker 06

  So I first met Saigo very early on when I was doing this crazy story about dog breeder serial killer and his wife who

• 21:32Speaker 06

  murdered a bunch of their customers who were unhappy with and they killed a Yakuza boss and

• 21:41Speaker 06

  his driver. Okay, so they killed the Yakuza boss and his driver. We all knew that the police were investigating this guy and we split up into teams to cover the people that were missing, people that had been killed by the by Sekinigane, his name in the serial killer. I got assigned to cover

• 22:00Speaker 06

  Endo Makoto and his driver Wakuisan. And in the course of, in the course of that investigation,

• 22:11Speaker 06

  I started dating Endo's mistress and Saigo was in the same organized crime group, the Inagawa Kai. And at one point, uh, he, you know,

• 22:24Speaker 06

  I, I think he actually came to her house or something. We had a sort of discussion of the fact that, you know, was it appropriate for me to be with the his brothers and the organization's mistress? And I was like, you know, the guy is probably dead and I, I should be award, I should be rewarded for taking care of his mistress. Because there's no one to look after her. And he just thought that was a lot of chutzpah and very funny. And then we just stayed in touch until about 2008.

• 22:53Speaker 06

  When I was put under police protection because I pissed off this Yakuza boss and he was kicked out of his organization because he owed a bunch of money to them. And so I asked him, you know, would you be my bodyguard and my driver? Because I need both. And he said, yes.

• 23:13Jack Murphy?

  Well, that's a, yeah, maybe before we we jump off into the next thing, we should talk about that a little bit more. You're you're talking about Goto, correct?

• 23:22Speaker 06

  Oh, yes, I'm talking about Goto.

• 23:24Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So tell us about kind of like how you pissed that dude off and how that became an issue for you.

• 23:31Speaker 06

  Oh, sure. Um, so Goto Tadamasa is kind of the Richard Branson of organized crime, like Richard Branson of if he was a homicidal homicidal maniac. So,

• 23:44Speaker 06

  you know, a little bit of background for for people who are not versed in this at all. So Japan has

• 23:50Speaker 06

  basically 20 crime families called collectively called the Yakuza. And the biggest of them all was the Yamaguchigumi, which at one time had 40,000 members.

• 24:01Speaker 06

  They are,

• 24:04Speaker 06

  they are

• 24:07Speaker 06

  public entities, meaning that, you know, they have offices, they have business cards. They exist in the public. Actually, I've got a fan magazine around. If you'd like me to pull it out, I could show it to you.

• 24:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Speaker 06

  Just to show you how crazy that is.

• 24:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, why not?

• 24:21Speaker 06

  Okay, hold on just a second. I'll go grab it.

• 24:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So Jake's talking about how uh there these Yakuza families, they they get writers and publishers to actually make fanzines, like magazines, extolling how great the Yakuza is and their exploits and how honorable they are and all this kind of stuff.

• 24:45Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. So here we are. So this is the Yakuza fan magazine. It's really thick.

• 24:55Speaker 06

  This one is especially issued because it has an article analyzing the legislation that was put on the books around 2000 in between 2009, 2011, which made it a crime to pay off the Yakuza. So there's a big article here about uh and also criticizing the National Police Agency for infringing on the human rights of Yakuza by outlawing some of their criminal activity. I mean, I laugh because it's like, it's not like you're born a Yakuza. You do have some choice there.

• 25:26Jack Murphy?

  Who is the

• 25:27Speaker 06

  So this is this is the

• 25:29Jack Murphy?

  Who's the readership of of magazines like this Jake like you know in America of course we have an interesting like crime films and crime dramas like that these criminals are edgy outsiders on the peripheral of society is that kind of who reads these magazines?

• 25:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so first of all, right at a time when there are 80,000 yakus in Japan, this is kind of like, you know, car and drivers here in the automobile industry.

• 25:56Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, so it's like a

• 25:59Speaker 06

  The people reading them are

• 26:00Jack Murphy?

  Industry publication.

• 26:03Speaker 06

  Yes, so it's an industry publication, but also people reading it are the police read it, right? Journalists read it. And then, you know, your your average sort of white collar worker and blue collar worker who dreams of being like a tough guy of not, you know, of having women in cars and lots of money and doing whatever they want, they read it too because it's exciting, right? People are interested in gangsters, like the same kind of people who love true crime. And there are probably some women readers who read it as well. So it's very male oriented.

• 26:34Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so back to Goto.

• 26:37Speaker 06

  So back to Goto. So Goto is was the head of the Yamaguchi Gumi, which is the largest organized crime group, which has been around since 1915, over 100 years. He was head of their Tokyo operations. And he was really ruthless and he was a really good businessman. And at one time, at one time, he was the largest individual shareholder of Japan Airlines. So I mean, think about that's a lot of money to have.

• 27:06Speaker 06

  But because he was ruthless, because he has no morals, he pissed off a lot of people. And he also didn't take very good care of himself. So he needed a liver transplant. And the best place to get a liver transplant is in the United States. And in order to get that liver transplant, because he was on a blacklist by the FBI, of course, the United States isn't going to let in a known criminal of his of his nature. And he made a deal with the FBI that that they would provide him a visa to go into the United States and get a liver transplant at UCLA. UCLA found him a liver. The FBI didn't find him didn't find him a liver, but

• 27:49Speaker 06

  He did that and he ratted out his buddies to get that deal. The FBI was kind of wanted intelligence about organized crime within the United States. The Japanese police and the National Police Agency would not cooperate with the FBI for reasons I've never understood. They wouldn't share their list of members with the FBI and the FBI wanted that list.

• 28:09Jack Murphy?

  So Goto had to go open kimono with the feds to get his liver.

• 28:15Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. But he kind of screwed them too, because as soon as he got his liver, he, you know, he checked out of the hospital. He only gave them about a fifth of what he promised. So it wasn't a very good deal in terms of for the feds either.

• 28:31Speaker 06

  So, you know, what I did is that I had heard about this. I'd heard about the fact that he got a liver transplant while covering this huge story about a loan shark who made like over hundreds of millions of dollars with this colossal loan sharking operation, which included laundering money at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I mean, really like movie thriller kind of stuff. And unfolding that story for years, I heard that Koto had made a deal to get into the United States and get a liver transplant. It took me a long time to figure out that he made a deal with the FBI to do it. And so when I started

• 29:10Speaker 06

  to write about it, someone ratted me out to him and, you know, I was hearing murmurs that that that he was very unhappy with what I was working on. And then the National Police Agency told me to come to the office and said, well, you know, you're under police protection. Apparently, there's a contract out on you. And, you know, what exactly are you up to? And so, you know, that was very awkward, too, because it's kind of like, oh, you know, I didn't really want to give up my sources, but they were quite aware of the fact that this deal had been made with the FBI and they weren't happy about it. So maybe they wanted this story out as well.

• 29:49Jack Murphy?

  It was a psycho kind of tipped you off, didn't he?

• 29:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, Sae Go was Sae Go was one of the people was like, you know, you you may be in some serious problems here. Um, you know, that's that's the weird thing about the underworld is it's like a giant junior high school where everybody knows each other. So you you get to hear things from other people, you know, even the other. Well, this is kind of strange. It's always been strange to me. So can you imagine like the Crips and the Bloods sending Christmas cards to each other?

• 30:23Jack Murphy?

  Not really, no.

• 30:24Speaker 06

  But in Japan, that's totally the way it is. You have all these different organizations. You have the Inagawa Kai, you have the Sumio Shikai, you have the Amaguchi Gumi, and to some extent, you can have you can be an Inagawa Kai, and you can be a Blood Brother with a member of someone in the Sumio Shikai. So you have these alliances that transcend organizations. So it becomes very complicated. Um, who knows what? And one third of the Yakuza are Korean-Japanese, and because Koreans in Japan are subject to auto-discrimination. So there's a substrata of people in the Yakuza groups who know each other. It's like, well, you're a fellow Korean,

• 31:02Speaker 06

  and even though we're in different organizations, we have this in common. Um, and and I always kind of liked navigating that labyrinth of connections between the organizations to get information because it's a reporter. Information is what you want, right? That's what gets you a scoop.

• 31:22Jack Murphy?

  So let's let's pick up the Goto story towards the end as we kind of jump forward in time. Um, and I'd like to dive in a little bit deeper with you into the Yakuza. Um, and if you can tell us a little bit, you alluded to already a bit about the history of it. Um, I think it's very, very interesting in the last Yakuza, how you explained that, you know, the Yakuza in very in a lot of ways was born out of a segment of the Japanese population that was marginalized, and they weren't allowed to work normal jobs. Um, so like the kind of the system sort of created this underworld at the time.

• 32:03Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. So, you know, originally, you know, let's talk about like, let's go back to 1870 stuff. There are two kinds of Yakuza. There were street merchants, and there were federations of gamers.

• 32:17Speaker 06

  But the Second World War comes and ends disastrously for Japan. And you have all these people. Sorry, my phone is making annoying noises. Actually, that was funny, it was just telling me there's an Inagawa Kai meeting tomorrow. They have monthly meetings and you can watch all the cars line up in front of their office in in Roppongi across from Ritz Carlton.

• 32:39Jack Murphy?

  Do they have someone that takes the minutes of the meeting?

• 32:43Speaker 06

  Yes, yes, they have someone that takes the minutes of the meetings. Uh, it's, it's, I mean, like I said, right? So it's very in your face, right? So,

• 32:52Speaker 06

  they have a, they have a monthly meeting. It's usually the same day. And then you can sort of do yakas watching, you can watch them come in their cars and see, you know, I think the Lexus is their favorite brand now. It used to be Mercedes Benz. And the cops are all lined up there, you know, watching them come in and out of the meetings. And sometimes there's still some reporters from the weekly magazines there to photograph the meeting. So that's always surreal. But back to your point. So, World War II ends and, you know, these guys come back from the war. And it's total chaos, right? The Japanese police force exists, but they have a limited ability to police things, especially what are called third-party nationals. The third-party nationals are people who were

• 33:38Speaker 06

  under Imperial Japan, the Taiwanese and the Chinese and the Koreans. Technically Japanese citizens, but not really. So after the war ends and Japan starts rebuilding, these people don't fit in. Like if you're Korean, Japanese, even if you nationalize, you know, the jobs open to you are basically Korean barbecue, brothel, love hotel owner, Pachinko parlor, Pachinko parlor being kind of like a a gambling pinball machine place. And so the Yakuza though were a meritocracy. So if you could do the time and you could do the crime, they would let you in.

• 34:20Speaker 06

  And there's a other weird outcast class in Japan called the Burakamine. The Burakamine are people who traditionally worked with leather, were butchers, dealt with animals because that was considered unclean to kill an animal. And the Yakuza welcomed these people and didn't care what your ethnic background is or whether you were part of the Burakamine class. And that was one of the reasons that they did so well. And they also have this code. I wouldn't even call it a code of honor. It's a code of conduct, which is certain things would get you kicked out of the Yakuza, especially in the early days, which is petty theft. That'll get you kicked out. Robbery, robbery is taking things with violence, right?

• 35:05Speaker 06

  You know, like mugging someone on the street. Dealing and using drugs, of course, sexual assault because, you know, that is not acceptable. And that would get you kicked out. But everything else extortion, racketeering, threatening people. That was all okay. You could do all those things.

• 35:27Jack Murphy?

  So but was it really a code or was it more like guidelines?

• 35:33Speaker 06

  It's a code. And you know, every, every faction has its own code of ethics. But the Inuyama, especially, right? And it always like all these things that depends on the boss. You broke that code, they kicked you out. And one of the things of issues that the people had with Goto was that he killed civilians. And killing civilians was a big no-no. Threatening journalists was a big no-no because you know, Japan has a sort of social contract with the Yakuza and, and the police as well. Like, okay, you know, you have these things that you do and you make your money that nobody else wants to do and we're fine with that. But once you step out of those lines, then you're just common criminals.

• 36:15Jack Murphy?

  Let's get a couple things out of the way that are sort of like the visible things about the Yakuza that people know about. Specifically, I want to talk about the tattoos and the sacrificial finger that gets authorized or offered as apology. What are the truth behind sort of these like the cultural mystique of the Yakuza?

• 36:38Speaker 06

  Okay, so, you know, I'm opening this up here to these guys.

• 36:45Speaker 06

  See, this guy, this is the leader of the Yamaguchigumi right here. Attending a

• 36:51Speaker 06

  attending a funeral for one of the founders of the organization.

• 36:57Speaker 06

  Oh, next to this is also a penis enlargement hat. They always have penis enlargement hats in these magazines.

• 37:03Jack Murphy?

  Who doesn't want one?

• 37:07Speaker 06

  Actually, I could tell you a funny story about the Yakuza boss who got one of these operations went badly. We'll move that later in the conversation. So, you know, Tsukasa is missing a finger.

• 37:22Speaker 06

  And and it's unclear why he's missing that finger. But I do know that it was an issue for the Yamaguchigumi when I wrote an article and I published a photo of him with the vice chairman of Japan's Olympic Committee, 2015.

• 37:40Speaker 06

  You know, this is Japan, right? The vice chairman of Japan's Olympic Committee photographed and clearly friends with the head of Japan's largest organized crime group. Was a minor issue and that was a nice scoop for me. But before I published the article, I called up someone in the Yamaguchigumi and said like, basically, I'm writing this article.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  You know, I'm not the only one that could write it. As a professional courtesy, I'm letting you know. And the only thing that was said to me was, could you crop the photo so that we don't see Tsukasa is missing his middle, his pinky there because he's very sensitive about it. I said, I can't do that, but I can include a line in the article that your boss is an honorable Yakuza, which I did. So first we'll get to this, the little finger thing.

• 38:30Speaker 06

  In a time when Japanese people use swords, right? If you cut off this finger here, you weaken your sword grip. So it is a sign of appeasement. By offering up part of your finger to the person you wronged, you're showing that you are sorry and you're weakening yourself, just like a dog shows its neck, right? In a dog fight to say like, "You want to take me out? Take me out. You know, let me live." So in Yakuza culture, there's two reasons you cut off your finger. And usually it's just the tip of your pinky, right? You know? Because you know, you don't want to cut off this much, this much. If you screwed up and you're chopping off your finger

• 39:13Speaker 06

  so that you can stay in the organization or make amends, or not pay a debt that you owe, that is called a shinnyubi, that is a dead finger. But if you do it on behalf of, say, your brother or your friend in the organization, who is done something wrong. Maybe he's stolen money from the organization. Maybe he's cooperated too much with the cops. Maybe he's fallen asleep on his job as a bodyguard. Anyway, he screwed up and you do that on behalf of him, then that is called an ikkyubi, which is a living finger. And that is considered very honorable. To sacrifice part of yourself, I mean, you are giving up part of yourself for somebody else.

• 39:58Speaker 06

  That is an honorable thing. And even though if you and I look at someone's finger, all we see is a missing finger, right? In the Yakuza world, which is like, you know, Tokyo Junior High School, everybody knows that that finger is either a dead finger or a living finger. If you're in the market for a new mattress, you've probably seen all the brands out there vying for your attention. Big names, splashy ads, all promising the same thing. But here's the only brand that does it right. It's Ghostbed. Ghostbed was created... And is still run by manufacturing experts with more than 20 years of mattress making experience. They know the craft and they know how to build a bed that actually lasts. So how do you they offer premium mattresses for up to 50% off less than the competition?

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• 43:13Jack Murphy?

  Um, and it's also the idea is that it makes you more reliant on the organization, right? Like, that's the part of the symbolism behind it.

• 43:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. The part of the symbolism, you've chopped with a finger, you're relying on the organization for your bread and butter. Because now you're weaker, but it's also a sign that you've atoned for something. But it can also be a symbol of strength, right? You know, it's painful to cut that off. So you show somebody your missing finger and it's like, like, okay, this is someone who has endured great pain to stay where they are. Or endure great pain on behalf of somebody else. And in the 50s and 60s, it sort of became like a cool thing to chop off a finger. Like, people would look for excuses, like, like, you know, what can I do to justify chopping off my finger so I look like a tough guy?

• 44:05Speaker 06

  I don't know if I mentioned this in the book, but

• 44:10Speaker 06

  people don't like to say yakuza in Japanese polite society because it, you know, scares people, right? You know, it's not, it's not said lightly.

• 44:20Speaker 06

  So often, instead of saying yakuza, they do this.

• 44:26Speaker 06

  And that symbolizes a cut across the face.

• 44:32Speaker 06

  So in the yakuza world, it used to be, especially in the days when you're having lots of gang wars, that

• 44:39Speaker 06

  instead of killing you, I would slash you across the face to show that I like you.

• 44:46Speaker 06

  And amongst the yakuza, that sort of became kind of a cool thing. But it's like, wow, I've been in a deadly fight, which I survived. So some of them started doing it to themselves. So that became, that's still the mark of a yakuza.

• 44:59Jack Murphy?

  Speaking of that, I mean, is that the same rationale behind the tattoos? It's sort of like showing your loyalty to the organization and that I'm this tough guy outsider in society.

• 45:12Speaker 06

  Because there's five, there's maybe five reasons you do that.

• 45:16Speaker 06

  One is, I mean, I love these people sending their tattoos here is.

• 45:23Speaker 06

  One reason that you, what you do the tattoos is because

• 45:28Speaker 06

  it shows that you are tough. Because the tattoos done the traditional Japanese way are incredibly painful. I mean, there's lots of blood. They're done with kind of an owl, A W L, like a sort of blunt instrument using sumi, which is kind of like charcoal. It's very painful. The skin is almost burnt. Sometimes, you know, it never returns to its sense, like you, you can't feel any warmth. It's like the skin is dead. Like somebody's burned there. In the Inugawa Kai, they call it gaman, which literally means endurance. So a tattoo shows, one, that you have separated yourself from normal straight society, right? You branded yourself, I'm an outlaw.

• 46:12Speaker 06

  The other is, I am tough. I have, my toughness can be seen on my tattoo, the density of tattoos on my skin.

• 46:20Speaker 06

  Sometimes the boss will pay for your tattoo, in which case you have to have the boss's name and the organization's emblem engraved on your chest. So that's like corporate branding taking at its, you know, to the ultimate level, right? You are part of the Inugawa Kai forever. It's on your chest.

• 46:39Speaker 06

  And another thing is it shows you have money. It's like a Rolex, right? The deeper the, you know, the deeper the tattoo, the more colorful it is, the more finite it is and the more of your body it covers. It shows that you have patience, endurance, and money. It takes hundreds of hours to get a full body tattoo. And all of those things make the tattoo very alluring to the

• 47:05Jack Murphy?

  So I guess the next thing before we go on to some stories and get back to SAIGO, could you kind of like briefly outline sort of like the landscape and territory of the Yakuza groups? I think you mentioned that there's about 20 of them and sort of like their territories.

• 47:23Speaker 06

  So the Yamaguchigumi, which is the largest one, is headquartered in Kobe. So Kobe is in western Japan, Kansai.

• 47:37Speaker 06

  They have like an entire city block and they have branches all over Japan.

• 47:43Speaker 06

  There used to be an agreement up until 2005 that the Yamaguchigumi couldn't open offices in Tokyo. Tokyo was off limits to them.

• 47:54Speaker 06

  And that was a very clear divide until 2005. The Inagawa Kai is mostly western Japan, Tokyo, Saitama, Guma, Fukushima, where the nuclear accident happened, they have a power base there.

• 48:09Speaker 06

  Semi-national, but not in Okinawa and not very powerful in Kyushu. The Sumiyoshikai is mostly located in Tokyo and surrounding areas. Ginza is their territory, so they got a lot of money and revenue from the hostess clubs and clubs in the Ginza area, which is a very rich area. And some of their, mostly Tokyo-based. The Matsubaka is sort of Guma area. And then you have things like the Kudokai, which is in Kyushu, which is a very powerful, very violent group. Actually, the most violent of the active groups is Kudokai. They're the guys that throw grenades into the bars of people that won't pay money.

• 48:55Speaker 06

  Most active groups are a little better about cultivating good relations with the public. If you throw grenades into a hostess bar that won't pay you money, the cops are gonna come down you on, and the people aren't gonna look at you as benevolent outlaws.

• 49:10Jack Murphy?

  In your books, you kind of make the point that the Yakuza do normally play a sort of stabilizing role in society rather than a disruptive one.

• 49:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, think about it this way, in a time when, in a time when, you know, the police were shorthanded, the Yakuza basically keep street crime to a minimum in the areas that they control, and they control every, and they controlled all of Tokyo, everybody paid protection money. And in return for that, no one was allowed to steal a purse, no one was allowed to be robbing places in the neighborhood because that's bad for business. You want people to go to the red light district and spend their money without worrying about getting mugged, or without worrying about getting robbed, or having their credit cards stolen. So, you know, in some levels, even the police considered them a necessary evil

• 50:04Speaker 06

  because they limited their activities to certain, certain activities which were collecting money from construction companies, bid rigging, you know, racketeering, gambling, and, you know, making pornography and other things that have always been on the, sort of the outside of Japanese life. And, you know, everybody paid the money, and that was kind of the revenue stream there. It's like, you ran a bar, you paid the money. If you were building a, an apartment building in the neighborhood, you paid the money. And in return

• 50:44Speaker 06

  for that, they kept, you know, a minimum of trouble out. And also at a time when there weren't enough lawyers in Japan, this is a very weird but true, true thing, it used to be very hard to pass the bar in Japan. So there was a shortage of lawyers. So if you had a civil dispute with someone, right, someone didn't pay you money, someone cheated you on a construction job, it might take you years to get your case into court and win the court battle, in which case, the court wouldn't necessarily enforce.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  The settlement. But if you went to the Yakuza, they would handle it immediately and they would give you half of what you were owed, which is better than none. So for a long time, the Yakuza played a huge role in settling civil disputes, car accidents, damages to property. It was expensive and time consuming to go to a lawyer. You went to the local Yakuza and they took care of it for you. So as the number of lawyers in Japan has increased, the number of Yakuza has also decreased. I can't say whether there's a correlation, but one lawyer I know who specializes in dealing with Yakuza, you know, he was always saying, yeah, you know, one of the reasons the Yakuza declined is because there's more lawyers here. So their services are not needed.

• 52:03Jack Murphy?

  Before we kind of get back to Saigo's story, one character in your books, especially The Last Yakuza, is filled with colorful characters. The one that I got to mention and ask you about was this guy that you name in the book as Coach, which was Saigo's sort of mentor for a long time. And this guy is like the real Tokyo Godfather, wears sunglasses even indoors, chain smoking cigarettes and, you know, lecturing his boys. The Yakuza used to follow a code, you know, sounds like absolutely the kind of guy you'd want to have a few drinks with.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  Oh, Kanazawa Yukusawa, yes, Kanazawa is a great guy. I mean, was a great guy. He's a really, I mean, right out of the movies. You know, before he was a Yakuza, he was a baseball player in the Tombol Flyers. So he's got this really sort of sports ethic to him. And, you know,

• 53:00Speaker 06

  he believed in, in the words he espoused. I mean, he was quite strict about that code of honor, you know, the one that was written on the wall of the, of the office, which is, you know, "Yakuza, do not bother ordinary people. Yakuza, do not steal. They do not rob. They do not engage in sexual assault. They do not engage in decency. They don't use drugs. They don't bother civilians."

• 53:23Jack Murphy?

  That quote in your book, you, you, you attribute to him, he says, "We're less than beggars, but better than thieves." And never forget that.

• 53:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. Less than a beggar, better than a thief. Yeah.

• 53:40Speaker 06

  One of the things that's really interesting about, you've seen the TV series, right?

• 53:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 06

  Shun Sagata plays Kanazawa San, right? He's a really sweet guy in, in real life. The guy who's Ishida, right? The one with the crew cut and wears sunglasses. Sort of the, the, the here, the leader of the Chiharakai.

• 54:02Speaker 06

  Shun Sagata has been around so long and he's been in so many Yakuza movies that he knew Kanazawa Nobuyuki. Like he knew the individual that he's essentially playing a TV version of, which I thought was fascinating. And, and that was one of the reasons I think he was so good at the role. It was, if you put two pictures of them together, they look similar. They have the same vibe.

• 54:25Jack Murphy?

  And the, the, I mean, what also in your book kind of strips some of the romanticism away from the Yakuza is Coach and other bosses in these organizations. I mean, yeah, they're part crime lord, but they're also like social worker to all of their underlings, trying to get them off of methamphetamine and all kinds of other shit.

• 54:46Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, I mean, it's like people who join the Yakuza are usually not very,

• 54:54Speaker 06

  you know, socially adept people, right? And so there was a kind of rationale and, and the head of the Amaguchi Bi said it as well as we take people who are misfits and we give them some discipline and we give them some training. So they're not running amok and wouldn't you rather have them, you know, disciplined criminals and disorganized criminals running around? And there's some truth to that as well. What is sad is that people like the Coach in recent years and, and also a result of increasingly harsh legislation have sort of disappeared. So the age where, you know, there were Yakuza who said, we won't do this because it's unethical. We won't do this because it's against the code.

• 55:36Speaker 06

  Those guys have all faded out because, you know, it's so hard to make a living. And in the Inagakai, the, you know, a lot of the people who were ethical, who insisted on following the old code have been kicked out because it's all about the money. You know, honor and, you know, nobility and, you know, what they called ninkyodo, the way of chivalry that the Yakuza are supposed to espouse. That's just an obstacle to getting things done.

• 56:07Jack Murphy?

  Let's jump back into Saigo's story for a bit because you have a totally crazy story about how he has to cut his finger off. And you talk about how it's kind of like some of the stories around this, this thing is bullshit. And a lot of guys find doctors to do it for them. But Saigo decides he's got to do it himself. And it turns into like a four alarm shit show in his kitchen.

• 56:32Speaker 06

  Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. I, this is a great story. And, you know, his, his wife Yuko-san, you know, when I asked her about it, she's just so very matter of fact about it, like, like, oh, yeah, you know, like, like, you know, like telling a funny story about like, maybe your husband, you know, getting a bad haircut. But, but basically, he doesn't know how to do it. And so he gets like a sashimi knife and, and puts it on there. And, you know, he and his wife try and do it and they, and they're not very successful. And then they, you know, try and do it with a cutting board and that isn't very successful. And it, you know, you have to turn over the finger to do it. And it's just a bloody, bloody mess.

• 57:15Speaker 06

  And at one point, one of his henchmen who used to be in the band with him, you know, as they're dealing with this, finally chopping off the finger and getting it's new and wrapping it in, you know, what are they going to do? And it's this very dark moment in the household where his blood all, you know, there's a, I don't think there's actually, she said there wasn't a lot of blood. But you've got this finger, you've got the cutting board, you've got to wrap it up and things is that he takes the finger and he puts it in his nose and sort of shakes his head around with it to make everybody laugh, which they do. Um, I just, you know, it, it is, it is bizarre.

• 57:56Speaker 06

  But I guess if you're there at the moment, there is something very comical about how hard it is to chop off your finger. I think there are actually books written that show you how to do it the right way.

• 58:13Jack Murphy?

  So Saigo has this like interesting trajectory through the Yakuza. He's a methamphetamine addict, comes in and out of it, falls off the wagon, coach tries to reform him, and he ends up getting kicked out, right? Because he owes, uh, he can't pay his, uh, union dues, as it were.

• 58:30Speaker 06

  Right, right, right. Yeah. Union dues. That's a great, a great word. I always say association dues, but union dues is a better word. Yes. He gets kicked out.

• 58:39Jack Murphy?

  Um, you want to talk a little bit about like how that happens and like the rise and fall of Saigo?

• 58:45Speaker 06

  Oh, sure, sure. So, most people enter the Yakuza, um, as what they call sumikomi, meaning like they go to the Yakuza boss and they're like, make me a man. And then they live inside of the Yakuza offices for like, you know, one to two years. They're basically answering the phone. They're, um, you know, washing the back of the boss. They're following him around. There is secretary, there's caddy, they're answering the phones. And they learn the trade by living in the establishment and are given kind of an allowance. But Saigo started as a, um, basically a motorcycle gangster, running a motorcycle gang, created his own

• 59:30Speaker 06

  right wing group that sort of functioned as a Yakuza group, shaking down local merchants and asking them to pay money to join his right wing organization or buy the periodical that the right wing organization was putting out. And when he decided to join the Inagawa Kai because he had a dispute with another gang boss, he, you know, he was entered like at a high level, like the, the Yakuza equivalent of going to West Point, right? Instead of starting as a private and working your way up, you know, from a listed, you know, he'd already established his own organization. They welcomed him. So he came in at like a captain level.

• 1:00:05Jack Murphy?

  And he kind of like set up, he ended up having his own office and everything. What, what was the nickname they gave to his little kingdom?

• 1:00:13Speaker 06

  Oh, oh, well, um, I mean, he, he, he had the nickname Tsunami because he was so violent and unpredictable, like a tropical storm that you never knew was coming. Um, so he had his own little, uh, his own little, his own little kumi there, you know, Saigo Gumi. So his own area and turf there that was, um, his property and everybody, you know, uh, everybody in that area paid. Machida City was where he had most of his, most of his power base. And as he rose up to, as up, you know, as he were up the ladder, you know, Inagawa Kai is a very bureaucratic organization. So everybody wants to rise to the top. And

• 1:00:56Speaker 06

  at one point they had 10,000 organizations. So he became like an executive director, which is a very high position. Um, and he was doing, you know, pretty well in the organization until, uh, a violent shooting in his neighborhood involving another Yakuza member really brought down the police hard on the whole organization where he lived and money started to dry up as people just said they wouldn't pay protection money anymore. Um, and one of the things you, you know, one of the reasons you're, you join the Yakuza, right, is it's like a franchise. So you're paying basically for the rights, like, you know, so you like the Yamaguchi

• 1:01:39Speaker 06

  Gumi here, right? The name, the organization, the, the symbol of the organization. It gets you money. It gets you power. If you don't have that organization money, you're like McDonald's without the golden arches. And that costs money and that costs everywhere, anywhere between a thousand dollars a month to $20,000 a month to stay on good terms. The higher you rise, the more money you have to pay. And he wasn't able to pay the money. And when you're not able to pay your dues, um, they kick you out. And also, he didn't answer his phone for a couple of days as well, which is a real bad one in the Yakuza. Um, what is it like in the military? If you're like on duty and you are on vacation, you don't answer your phone, you get in big trouble?

• 1:02:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you'd be in some trouble if you're on duty and not answering the phone. Yes.

• 1:02:29Speaker 06

  Um, okay. Uh, what if you're on vacation? Would you still get in big trouble if you like, you know, you're on

• 1:02:36Jack Murphy?

  Prob-

• 1:02:36Speaker 06

  Western recovery and-

• 1:02:38Jack Murphy?

  Probably not if you're on vacation, no.

• 1:02:42Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, this guy's active duty, right? So he basically disappeared from duty for like seven days because he's pissed off and uh, they kicked him out. And, and he just had a kid. Um, and now he's got no revenue and, and meanwhile, like I am under police protection, but I'm really tired of like not being, of feeling like I can't leave the house. And so I heard that he's, you know, that he's out of a job. And at the time, if you read Tokyo Noor, I'm doing these due diligence work, right? So I've, I've got a a nice steady stream of money doing these corporate investigations coming in.

• 1:03:20Speaker 06

  And I also realized that he, you know, doesn't like Goto Tadamasa, that he's not a big fan of them. And I'm like, you know, this is probably synergy. So we have a meeting at my house and I basically say, look, you know, you don't have a job and I need uh, protection. Um, and I, and also you have a car. I don't have a driver's license. What do you say? And so sort of reluctantly, um, but also because he didn't have much of a choice. He's like, okay, I will be your bodyguard and I will be your driver, but I have one condition. And I'm like, what is that condition? And he said, I want you to write a book about my life and about the Yakuza because I am proud

• 1:04:00Speaker 06

  of who I am and what we've done. And I want my son to know, um, who his father was when he grows up. And so

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  you know, I agree with him on the condition that I get to write the truth about the Yakuza and not in another book, talking about how there are these noble outlaws, you know, fearless men fighting for, you know, traditional Japan. And he was okay with that. Um, and that was the start of that book, um, was hiring him as a, as a bodyguard. And he wanted me to write this, this story about, about the Yakuza uh, and his life. And you know, what are the Yakuza? And they're, you know, what he saw as their decline from being principled people to just money grabbing organization.

• 1:04:46Jack Murphy?

  And so how did the situation between you and Goto end up getting resolved?

• 1:04:52Speaker 06

  Oh, um, it ended up getting resolved like this. Uh, I wrote an article, it came out of the Washington Post. Um, then, uh, another article came out in the Los Angeles Times. And then suddenly it became, I became the least of his problems. And I think that someone way up in the organization told him like, at this point in time, considering the bad press that would, that it would bring you, do not harm this journalist. Um, and also, because I'm not an idiot, uh, when I was writing the article for the Washington Post, I went to one of his rivals, um, in the organization, in the same Yamaguchigumi, right?

• 1:05:37Speaker 06

  Because this is, the Yamaguchigumi is factional, right? I don't, I don't know if people understand that, like, it's not like the army and it's not like, it's not like the Navy. Um, it is a group of organized crime groups under the umbrella of the Yamaguchigumi. But even within that organization, there are conflicts between the factions. So the Yamaguchigumi, the Takugumigumi, and, um, the Hanabusugumi, they all may be fighting for the same territory and, and, and, um, revenue streams, even though they're under the same umbrella. Um, and amongst these Yakuza bosses, they don't all get along, right?

• 1:06:18Speaker 06

  So you've got, you know, 60 or 70 organizations within the Yamaguchigumi. So I thought of the one Yakuza boss who really disliked Goto and probably would like his turf and territory. So I went to him and I asked him for a comment for the Washington Post article. Um, first I had to go to a tenant and then I spoke directly to the big boss. And as we were speaking, I also felt that there was this kind of communication between us, which was like, you know, as they say in the Yakuza world, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And, and I was basically saying to him, without saying it bluntly, is, keep me alive and let me write my article and this will result in the downfall of your rival and that turf and territory is yours.

• 1:07:02Speaker 06

  Um, and that seemed to have worked out very nicely because, uh, there wasn't a contract on me after the Washington Post article came out. Um, but the police still kept me under protection for another five years in total.

• 1:07:19Jack Murphy?

  And it's interesting how like Goto and also Coach, they have these like interesting deaths or like deaths in air quotes, like you're never really sure, did they die or did they just fade away? Where did they go?

• 1:07:35Speaker 06

  Um, you know, Yakuza sometimes disappear. Um, so the coach, you know, his, his death is shot in the mystery. It was like, people aren't supposed to talk about it. And I think that's how he wanted it to be. Um, remember, Goto Tadamasa is famous for attacking this film director named Itami Juzo. So Itami Juzo made this film in 1992 called The Gentle Art of, of Japanese Extortion. Um, and the Japanese title is Minbo no Onna. And Goto's men attacked this director at his home and they sliced open his face very slowly. So it left scars. And a few years later, in 1999, I think around 1999, the director allegedly

• 1:08:20Speaker 06

  committed suicide by jumping from the top of a building, um, just as he was making another film that had connections to Kotokumi. But, uh, one of Goto's guys named Mikuni told me, you know, on the conditions of, uh, on the conditions that I couldn't tell his name if in, unless 10 years had gone by, in terms of the time he told me, um, he said, yeah, well, you know, that director, Itami, didn't kill himself. He was taken to a roof and they put a gun in his face and they told him, you can either jump, um, and you might live, or you can stay here and blow off your face and you'll definitely die. And I, I assumed that Mikuni told me that because he was hoping that would be

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

  his insurance policy, but he's been missing now for five years and nobody knows where he is. Um, I mean, easy Yakuza, you can find his name in the newspapers, you can find his name in the Yakuza fan magazines, but he's gone. Um, now is he in hiding? Uh, is he in the? Bottom of a building in Tokyo, buried in the cement base, uh, when they're a foundation of the building, I don't know. But, uh, sometimes yakuza really do fade away. Like, where did this guy go? Um, and there's a lot of them. Uh, I mean, there used to be eighty thousand yakuza in Japan. Now there's nineteen thousand, like, so where do those other sixty, sixty-one thousand yakuza vanish to? Do they find new jobs? Are they in prison? What are they doing now?

• 1:09:51Jack Murphy?

  A couple of sidebars I'd like to talk about, um, before moving on. I, one of them is the North Korean connection with the Pachinko parlors.

• 1:10:04Jack Murphy?

  You tell us about that?

• 1:10:05Speaker 06

  Oh, sure. Yeah. I, I don't know how many of you listeners understand what Pachinko is, but I'll try and explain it as simply as I can. So Pachinko is kind of like a pinball machine that's vertical. So you put in a steel ball, press a button, ball goes in. If the ball hits the right targets, it triggers like an avalanche and the machine spews out these steel balls. The steel balls you can then take to a gift counter, you can get a gift, or you can get sort of an exchange card and you can go outside of the Pachinko parlor to another place and get it turned into cash.

• 1:10:49Speaker 06

  So that is sort of legalized gambling in Japan.

• 1:10:54Speaker 06

  Pachinko was something that the Korean-Japanese did after the war, and it was a big amusement thing. But it looked like the Japanese government was going to outlaw them altogether. So, you know, most of the Japanese owners quit, but the Koreans kept, kept running the Pachinko parlors. And the Pachinko parlors are still a big part of the gambling landscape today, even though it's, you know, semi-legal gambling. But remember, Korea splits into Korea, South Korea and North Korea. And the Koreans left in Japan have to choose an alliance. Like, going to a line, you know, am I going to claim citizenship with North Korea? Am I going to change? You know, are we going to claim citizenship with South Korea?

• 1:11:37Speaker 06

  And for those who have relatives in North Korea, the Pechinko parlors became indirectly North Korean revenue because if you have family members in North Korea and you're in Japan and you're living there and you're running Pechinko Power, the North Korean associations will come to you and say, you know, your uncle, your sister, your brother, your cousin, you know, they're going to starve to death unless you contribute some money to the homeland. And so for many years, Pechinko industry has been one of the sources of of North Korea's revenue.

• 1:12:11Jack Murphy?

  Does North Korea still make money by selling drugs and operating these parlors and so on in Japan?

• 1:12:19Speaker 06

  Yes, North Korea still has revenue coming in, but as generations die off, right? You know, you had, you know, if you're a fourth generation

• 1:12:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 06

  Korean in Japan, you don't, you don't know anybody who's still living in North Korea. You're, you know, your, your uncle or your, or your grandfather or whoever is there, you know, you maybe you've never met them. You have no idea who they are. So you don't feel compelled to pay. So that money keeps dwindling. What North Korea is really making money now is, is doing cracking, hacking cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan. I think they've done two now. I mean, there's been traced to North Korea. North Korea is really good at hacking and they seem to be really good at hacking Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges like Bitcoin DMM. And there was another one just really recently. And, and I think North

• 1:13:11Speaker 06

  Korea, while it still makes methamphetamines, it's hard to get them into Japan. And they moved on to cyber crimes, which brings a lot more revenue.

• 1:13:23Jack Murphy?

  Another kind of subplot that you bring out in the book that I was surprised to read is about

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• 1:14:45Jack Murphy?

  Omshinriko, the cult in Japan that launched a, I believe it was a sarin nerve gas attack in the Japanese subway system, killed a couple of people. You talk about how they had a secondary plot to use a helicopter as a dispersion device for another gas attack. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, how you kind of uncovered that and reported on that?

• 1:15:09Speaker 06

  Oh, sure. So, Omshinriko was this criminal organization and a cult that was an end of the world cult, an apocalyptic cult, and they recruited people from universities and police and laboratories. And they had this, you know, crazy view of the world. And they were also making methamphetamine and wholesaling it to the yakuza, especially the godogumi. Because you have a bunch of chemists there, right? Who can, you know, can make a really good meth and meth brings in money. It's like it's the drug of choice in Japan. So they're producing drugs. They're selling it to the yakuza.

• 1:15:50Speaker 06

  The conduit between the Yamaguchi-Gumi and the North Korea was an Om sort of high priest named Murai.

• 1:16:00Speaker 06

  And, you know, as the police are investigating Omshinriko and looking at what they're doing and getting a sense that these people are maybe producing nerve gas and they're going to plan a huge terrorist attack. One of the organized crime cops who was working on the connection between Omshinriko and...

• 1:16:20Speaker 06

  And the Yakuza discovered that they had purchased a helicopter and that they and that they were planning to use it for something nefarious. Unfortunately, I think that they managed to make sure that the that they were never put soldering gas on the helicopter. So the soldering gas attack ended with these paper bags full of soldering gas being put on the subways all around Ibia, which were then poked with holes. And and and it could have killed thousands of people. Fortunately, they didn't do the helicopter and disperse it over Tokyo. I don't know how successful that would have been, but it could have been disastrous.

• 1:17:02Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, if it was an aerosol dispersal, it would have been much greater casualties, I think.

• 1:17:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, they they were not make good at making aerosol. You know what? What I don't know if I remember I put in the book or not is they also had a subdivision in New York City and were looking about spreading it in New York City with the helicopter as well. That was part of their plans.

• 1:17:26Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 1:17:27Speaker 06

  Because because Omshinikyo had this, you know, this makes no sense, but Omshinikyo also had this incredible anti-Semitic view that the Jews were controlling the world economy. And that was one of their problems. And they were like, there's so many Jews in New York that we should spread sun gas there using a helicopter to, you know, to change the new world order. So that was amongst the crazy things that they had planned. And they, you know, they had purchased helicopters from Russia. So, you know, if they hadn't been stopped early on, they might have tried it. I think we were lucky that we ended up

• 1:18:08Speaker 06

  with the smaller number of casualties that we had. But these guys were crazy. Have you ever been in the series Millennium with Frank with Lance Hendrickson?

• 1:18:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 1:18:19Speaker 06

  About the X-Files?

• 1:18:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 06

  Okay, so there's, there's one episode, maybe the second episode called Gehenna, which was modeled after Omshinikyo, where you have people, they're telemarketers working for this strange cult. And there's a scene where someone is microwaved to death. Well, Omshinikyo did that. They built a giant microwave. One of their dissenters, they put in the microwave and they like fried him alive.

• 1:18:43Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 1:18:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, these guys were insane and they were working hand in hand with organized crime. And when, you know, when it was revealed that Om had planned, you know, had was responsible the Saudi gas attacks and that they had ties to Yamaguchi Gumi. You know, that's not a good for the public image of the group, right? So Murai, who's the head of the, one of the executives of Om Shinriko was coming out of a press conference and he was stabbed to death by this, you know, so-called right-winger. And the right-winger, of course, turned out to be a yakuza, a Korean yakuza.

• 1:19:27Speaker 06

  And, you know, you know, he always claimed that, you know, that he did it out of patriotic, out of patriotic reasons, but when Joe, which is the name of the, of the person who assassinated Murai, when he got out of jail after serving his time for killing this Om leader who had connections to the Go To Gumi, guess who he went to work for?

• 1:19:48Jack Murphy?

  Shinriko.

• 1:19:49Speaker 06

  Toru Tadamasa. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:51Jack Murphy?

  Oh, really?

• 1:19:52Speaker 06

  Killing, yeah, because he, he killed the one person that could have fingered the Yakuza involvement with Om Shinriko. And his reward when he got out of jail was going, going to work for Go To who had by this point retired, but at least he took care of his own.

• 1:20:08Jack Murphy?

  You know, something you, you touched on there that I think I'll, I'll ask you because it's something that has always baffled me personally, is you mentioned that Om Shinriko had this sort of anti-Semitic bent to them. And I've seen that a little bit with other like right-wing groups in Japan, this sort of anti-Semitism. And that baffles me because what in the world do the Japanese people know about Jews? I mean, we're not talking about Israel and Palestine. We're not talking about Europe. We're not talking about America. Like, there aren't any actual Jewish people, other than you, maybe, in Japan. So like, where the hell does this notion come from?

• 1:20:48Speaker 06

  Well, there is, there is a Senate, there's like one or two senadochs. I don't know, you know? I mean, it's like, remember, the Japanese were allied with, with Germany at one point, right?

• 1:21:00Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:21:02Speaker 06

  And so I think there's always been this belief that, you know, first of all, there's a belief, there's a weird respect for the Jews. There's a book called The Jews and the Japanese, which points out the similarity between the Jews and the Japanese. So on the one hand, there's this kind of Japanese fantasy world in which they admire, like, the way that this minority group is, you know, gained so much power, are done so well financially, and there's so many sort of geniuses, or the way that they, that they know, they consider the Jewish family structure very similar to a Japanese family structure. And it even, you know, in this book postulating the Japanese are the lost tribe of Israel, all that's crazy stuff, you know. I, it doesn't make any sense to me.

• 1:21:45Speaker 06

  So there's an admiration and there's a fear. And, and, and one of the weirdest stories of World War II is that there was this idea that amongst the Japanese elite, some of the generals, that they couldn't trust Germany because they weren't white. And at some point, the Germans would turn on them. So they smuggled a bunch of Jews out of Shanghai into Kobe and gave them safe passage so that when, when it came time to deal with Germany, that they would have Jewish power on their side. And that whole plan to smuggle them out of, of, of, you know,

• 1:22:29Speaker 06

  of German territories into Japan and Shanghai was called the Fugu Plan, because Fugu, as you know, is this poisonous blowfish, which if you handle properly is a delicious delicacy, but if you mishandle, can kill you. So, you know, the Japanese fascination, our fear of Jews is never made any sense to me.

• 1:22:54Jack Murphy?

  Me neither.

• 1:22:54Speaker 06

  But on my way, on my way to the airport, there was a book, like, in the, you know, bestsellers, which was like, you know, How to Succeed in Business Like the Jews. And I'm like, really? You're still putting this out in the book in 2025?

• 1:23:12Jack Murphy?

  Okay, this is as good a time as any to jump into, you gotta tell us the Japanese penis, or the Yakuza penis enlargement story that you told us about that went horribly wrong.

• 1:23:24Speaker 06

  Okay, so here we are. So here's your Yakuza fan magazine, right? You know, always opens with pictures of the bosses going to meetings and stuff. I just gotta show you that that's important stuff, right? This is the paparazzi part.

• 1:23:38Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 06

  And there's always the penis enlargement stuff. Um, so Nomura, who is the head of the Kudokai, who I have met once.

• 1:23:50Speaker 06

  I think his name is Nomura Satoshi. You know, in Japan, the last names are more important than your first names. He sees one of these ants. He decides to get a penis enlargement procedure done. So he's getting it done, and his nurse noticed that he's wincing. And she says to him, "Look at you with all those tattoos all over your body that are so painful to reproduce, and you can't take a little prick." And she laughs at him.

• 1:24:17Jack Murphy?

  Damn.

• 1:24:18Speaker 06

  And he's really, really angry about it. So later, his men attempt to kill her. And one of the reasons he was originally given a death sentence, which I think was changed to life imprisonment on appeal, was for the attempted murder of this nurse.

• 1:24:32Jack Murphy?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:24:33Speaker 06

  Because he couldn't take the pain of the penis enlargement procedure.

• 1:24:40Jack Murphy?

  Oh, poor guy, getting his penis messed with.

• 1:24:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, getting his penis messed with. Um, I mean, it's kind of a low moment in Yakuza history.

• 1:24:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:54Speaker 06

  I mean.

• 1:24:56Jack Murphy?

  So let's, let's talk about Tokyo Noir, your third book. That kind of follows up on Tokyo Vice and continues sort of your own story and experiences in Japan.

• 1:25:12Jack Murphy?

  So you get brought into a State Department study on human trafficking in Japan. Um, how, how does that sort of come about out of your work as a journalist?

• 1:25:26Speaker 06

  Well, when I was working for the Human trafficking, we covered human trafficking. And I noticed there was a huge discrepancy between the way the Japanese police were presenting, you know, their efforts to combat it and what was really happening. And so I had, you know, I knew people in the State Department, so I would pull aside stories that I'd worked on or stories where the Japanese press that showed, you know, because Japan didn't have any real laws prohibiting human trafficking or punishing the traffickers, but only punished the women, that, you know, that there was a huge failure to deal with this problem,

• 1:26:07Speaker 06

  even address it as a problem. And I think one of the last things I wrote at the newspaper before I left was, the International Labor Organization did a huge study of human trafficking in Japan, which the Japanese government paid for. And their conclusion was that Japan wasn't dealing with the problems. They were punishing the victims, immediately deporting them, and the traffickers knew that they could get away with it, and that Japan was turning a blind eye to the problem and needed to put serious legislation down on the books. But here's the thing, the Japanese government told the I O L, you cannot release the report. Like, we paid for it, but you can't release it. So I got a copy of it, and we ran a article

• 1:26:51Speaker 06

  on it on the front page of the paper, summarizing the main points of it, at which point, since the cat's out of the bag, then they released the report. And I also got a copy of it to the State Department. So after I'd left the newspaper and was back in Missouri, ready to go to law school, the U S State Department, which was under George Bush, had decided that they really wanted to pressure Japan into dealing with the human trafficking problem on a serious level. And the only way that was going to happen was if they could shame Japan into doing it. So they decided to do an investigation into the methodology of human trafficking in Japan. And they wanted plausible deniability, so they farmed it

• 1:27:35Speaker 06

  out to a nonprofit organization called Charon International, which then farmed it out to a Another company in the Virginia area that was, you know, staffed by a whole bunch of ex CIA people and NSA people and FBI people. And then they asked me to be the investigator on the grounds. And I said, yes, because it seemed very important. It seemed like if you could actually dig up the material on who was, you know, who was allowing human trafficking to thrive in Japan? What legislators were blocking changes in the laws? Who was profiting from it? What, what was the collusion between organized crime and immigration? That that could have a positive impact on the world?

• 1:28:19Speaker 06

  And the other thing that I liked about the offer when it came to my way was that they told me, um, I didn't have to submit expense reports that they didn't want any receipts because they didn't want to know how I got the information.

• 1:28:33Jack Murphy?

  That's the most CIA thing ever, right there.

• 1:28:37Speaker 06

  Yeah?

• 1:28:38Jack Murphy?

  That's, that's the most like CIA thing ever.

• 1:28:42Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, it makes sense, right? I mean, even though I am talking to people in the State Department, right? I'm working on this.

• 1:28:50Speaker 06

  Um, I mean, even though I'm talking directly to the, to these people and they know that I'm working on it. We, you know, there's still this sort of, you know, goes to the group, it goes to the, the consulting company, goes to the nonprofit organization, goes to State Department. Sometimes I, I, you know, it went directly. Um, because you and I both know the fastest way to get information about criminal activities is to pay a criminal. And, and this is where knowing the Yakuza is helpful because in this world in which these people consider themselves the good guys, right?

• 1:29:22Speaker 06

  What is the lowest of the low? There's pedophiles, there's child pornographers, there's human traffickers. So if you talk to someone who's a Yakuza of any moral fiber at all and you say, look, dude, uh, I want to know who in your, who in your outfit is running these kind of operations and, uh, and I could pay you. There's a lot of people raised their hands. There are some people who are like, I don't need any money. Like, you know, these, these people are awful. You know, like prostitution is one thing, but enslaving someone, not paying them for their sex work. That's just awful. That's slavery. So that was, you know, an interesting job to have. And it turns out that one of the people who was receiving money and political favors from

• 1:30:07Speaker 06

  basically a lobby of human traffickers was. So one of the ways that women were being trafficked into Japan at the time was the use of an entertainment visa. Right? So they would come in as allegedly as entertainers and they get there, their passports would be taken away. And they would, you know, be threatened, you know, like, we know where your family is. You work and you do this job and it wasn't the job that they were, that they, that they signed up for.

• 1:30:34Speaker 06

  And then at some point they would be sent back. So there was this group called the Zengeiran, which was an association of entertainment groups. And basically they were a human trafficking lobby. And this group was having their annual meeting at the headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party, which is the ruling party. So it would be like the Republican Party or the Democrat Party having a convention of human traffickers at their headquarters. And one of the politicians they were particularly friendly with and giving donations to was Shinzo Abe, who later became the Prime Minister of Japan, twice. And these were the kind of things that I was giving the, the State Department in my reports to them.

• 1:31:17Speaker 06

  You know, after I left the newspaper while working for, while working for them on this project. And so, you know, there were a couple of other politicians who were definitely receiving money to turn the other way and block legislation that would stop, which was a profitable industry.

• 1:31:32Jack Murphy?

  What was the outcome of this study that you were a part of? Like, did it actually force some reforms within the Japanese legal system?

• 1:31:41Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that happened is that the Zen Giren dissolved. Prime Minister Abe or Shinzo Abe disassociated himself from the organization. So this human trafficking lobby dissolved itself. The Japanese police began really enforcing the laws and putting traffickers away on a big, on a, on a big scale. And I think that the sort of backdoor deal, and I'm not privy to what actually happens behind backdoors on this, but my feeling was that the United States said to Japan, we're going to rank you as low as North Korea, unless you get serious about this problem. And you also need to clean up the problems that are at the Nagoya immigration, because there was definitely one immigration

• 1:32:27Speaker 06

  office in which the girls were being trafficked through like, you know, with, you know, they, they, they clearly made no attempts to screen the girls to see if they were really in Japan on entertainment visas. And the restrictions for entertainment visas became very severe. So, you know, by 2009, I feel like Japan as a destination place for human traffickers had really sort of fallen off the map. So, yeah, I definitely think good came out of it.

• 1:32:56Speaker 06

  And sometimes, you know, in, in that time when Japan cared about what, what the world thought of it, they didn't want to be shamed and didn't want to be listed as like, you know, next to North Korea in terms of how they dealt with human trafficking. So of, of the things that the Bush administration did, you know, their efforts to curb human trafficking and to get, you know, at least Japan to think it seriously, you have to give them a pat on the back. Well done, Japan.

• 1:33:22Jack Murphy?

  Talk to us a little bit about getting involved in the world of private investigations and due diligence and how this is sort of a segue for you from journalism.

• 1:33:34Speaker 06

  Oh, so, you know, while I'm working on this human trafficking study, Japan starts cracking down on the Yakuza in the stock markets. The Yakuza had moved so much into the financial markets that in a white paper put out by the National Police Agency around 2006, 2007, they pointed out that the Yakuza made these huge inroads into the financial world and said, you know, the incursion of organized crime, aka the Yakuza, into Japan's financial markets threatens the very foundations of our economy. And so they really began looking at the links of Yakuza, like, setting up front companies and doing stock market manipulation

• 1:34:17Speaker 06

  or being basically venture capitalist and creating companies like, or powering companies like Goodwill Corporation, which was one of the largest labor dispatch companies in Japan.

• 1:34:31Speaker 06

  And they also decided they weren't going to give foreign banks or foreign investment companies, you know, a free pass. So one of the things that happened around 2004 is they basically took away Citibank's private banking license because they were involved, you know, in handling Yakuza money. And they had either no one in compliance, or they had people in compliance and they were still doing business. And so that was kind of a warning bell to all these investment companies that were in Japan, big banks like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, that they needed to get their shit together, or the financial services agency would come down on them, maybe take away their licenses. And so...

• 1:35:15Speaker 06

  As all this is happening, this one investment bank, and then later another one, reached out to me and said like, you know, we hear that you are someone who is well versed in this world, and that you could spot what is called a front company, meaning a company that is illegitimate or is running a fraudulent operation. Sometimes there are companies that are actually successful, but using Yakuza-like tactics like blackmail and insider trading, or getting seed money from organized crime. And so, I was like, sure, you know, it sounds interesting to me. It sounds like what I've been doing as a reporter for many years. And so I started taking on these jobs. And not only was the pay very lucrative, it's really

• 1:35:58Speaker 06

  interesting to sort of, you know, learn to spot what is a front company, learn to see what is a company that is really run by organized crime. And that sparked the gamut from, you know, coffee shop chains, to pride octopus ball places, to massage parlors, and sometimes they were running accounting firms, database companies. There was even this firm called Yubitoma, which was kind of Japan's classmates.com, and a Yakuza boss from the Kodo guy took it over. So, why do you think a boss would want, a Yakuza boss would want to take over the Japanese equivalent of classmates.com?

• 1:36:41Jack Murphy?

  Extortion, blackmail?

• 1:36:43Speaker 06

  Yes, exactly, right? I mean, you know, you've got, the site had three million users, three million users, mostly used for people...

• 1:36:54Speaker 06

  You know, and you know how people tend to misbehave at high scoring unions. Not me, but you know, other people. It's kind of, it's such a fertile, fertile, there's probably communications going on between people on these websites that they should definitely not have, and that was very attractive to me.

• 1:37:14Jack Murphy?

  But you did dip your hands into journalism a few more times during this time period. Um, there's a very interesting chapter in Tokyo Noir about the earthquake in Fukushima, the nuclear power, uh, you know, meltdown that took place. And the Yakuza involvement, both in the nuclear power industry, but also in responding to the earthquake and the resulting tsunami, if you can tell us about that a bit.

• 1:37:44Speaker 06

  Sure. Um, so, you know, this was actually the very first article I ever wrote for the Daily Beast. The Yakuza claim to be humanitarian organizations. And it is true that in times of crisis like the Kobe earthquake in 1995,

• 1:38:00Speaker 06

  that they're very quick to get to the scene of the, of where the tragedy is taking place. And they have institutional awareness because unlike government agencies where people rotate out, these same people have been there for years.

• 1:38:16Speaker 06

  So they know what to bring. They bring blankets. They bring food. They bring tents. Sometimes they bring generators.

• 1:38:24Speaker 06

  They bring everything to the scene that people need. And when the Fukushima disaster happened, uh, I was pretty sure that they would be very, very, they would be the first responders because they know what is needed and they've got no red tape. So I was stranded in the United States when the nuclear accident and the, and the meltdown and the tsunami hit.

• 1:38:49Speaker 06

  But I was in touch with people back in Japan. And so, you know, I was asking, what are you doing? And, and the Daily Beast also contacted me and said, could you write something about what is happening in Fukushima? And I said, I can write you about what the Yakuza are doing, which is interesting because they are going into dangerous areas with food and shelter and no protection. And so, you know, I was like, well, You know, I, I, I don't think the Yakuza are a positive force for, for Japan, but you have to give the devil his due. They were certainly very active in going there and trying to bring peace and comfort to people in a time of need. And so, but I also don't trust them because,

• 1:39:33Speaker 06

  you know, they're Yakuza. So I made them send me films and in, you know, video of them downloading supplies and receipts and other things so I could be comfortable with writing it. And we, we wrote it up for the Daily Beast and that story went viral. And I think that also changed my relationship with some of the Yakuza bosses as well in a very positive way.

• 1:39:59Jack Murphy?

  And I think you may point out in the book too, about how like one of the remaining sources of revenue for the Yakuza is the nuclear power industry or power industry in general.

• 1:40:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a dirty, what they call in Japan, a Sankei job. It's kitanai, it's kiken, it's kuruishi. So painful, dirty, dangerous. I guess in Japanese, it's like three Ds. I mean, in English, it's like three Ds. So the Yakuza labor dispatch has always been one of their businesses. And so the nuclear power plants are supplied by, the workers there are supplied by the Yakuza. They always have been because they can find homeless people. They can find people who want to disappear. They can find people who will work for cash, who, you know, who don't have ID or who don't want to be identified because they're on the lam. And that has been a sort of symbiotic relationship.

• 1:40:55Jack Murphy?

  And the companies need this because there's like a radiological contamination, like these are legitimately dangerous jobs?

• 1:41:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's legitimately dangerous jobs. The amount of radiation someone can be exposed into a year is limited. And so, you know, and there's very people who want to do that work. So the Yakuza are basically where they're going to go. I mean, these days in Japan, if you're a Yakuza, you cannot join a sports club, cannot go to a hotel, you can't get a golf course, you can't get a cellphone. But if you want to work in a nuclear power plant, door is open. And I've spoken to people at the National Police Agency, like, you know, basically Japan's equivalent of the

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• 1:42:57Speaker 06

  FBI and asked them, like, why don't you do background checks? And very honestly, these guys have told me, you know, of course, we should do background checks because these guys are criminals and it's not a good idea to have them next to materials that could be used to build a dirty bomb or do something nefarious. And if we do institutionalize them, you know, and if someday we really do background checks on these people, that would be a good thing. And, you know, what do you think would be the natural follow-up to the question to that?

• 1:43:33Jack Murphy?

  I mean, so why aren't you doing it?

• 1:43:36Speaker 06

  Well. So, you know, the answer to that is, we're not doing it because if we do it, we won't have anyone to run the nuclear power plants.

• 1:43:48Jack Murphy?

  Right, so these plants are not up to code to begin with? Is, is, I mean, like, you can't get normal union guys to come work this job because it's not safe?

• 1:44:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of the plants are closed down, right? I mean, closed down after that nuclear disaster, but you have to maintain them, right? Some of these plants are 40 years old. They weren't designed to last this long. They keep extending the life of them. Recently, while no one was looking, I think Japan extended the, the, the ability to keep a nuclear power plant running for another 10 years or something. So you could have plants running for 60 years? They're not designed to do that. I mean, Fukushima is such a disaster that everyone thinks it's over, but if you don't pour water into that nuclear core, you will have nuclear fission again. Like, every day, they're pouring water into the nuclear reactor at Shima. They retrieved almost none of the core materials yet.

• 1:44:44Speaker 06

  And if they stop pouring water into it, you get basically another nuclear reaction. And, and so every day, Japan keeps pumping water into the Fukushima reactor core, and every day, that polluted water goes out into the ocean. Probably where for 30, 40 years ago.

• 1:44:59Jack Murphy?

  One of the big scandals, I think you point out in the book, is that the Fukushima, uh, one of the reactors there melted down before the tsunami came. So it was actually the earthquake that caused it to melt down, and then the tsunami came afterwards.

• 1:45:14Speaker 06

  Right, right. Within, within, the, the data that was collected by this, by the scientist named Kimura, um, showed that within one minute of the, of the, of the big, of the giant, um, Tohoku.

• 1:45:30Speaker 06

  Um earthquake that there was no water going to the nuclear core because all the pipes burst. It's a forty year old reactor, you know, pipes were bursting everywhere. Water was coming out everywhere. There was no, if you can't get the water to the, to the reactor, it's going to overheat because all the pipes are gone and are cracked and busted. And, and, you know, all the data indicates that it was a nuclear, there was the earthquake itself which caused that, that nuclear accident and one of the reactors. The, the story that the TEPCO Tokyo Electric Power Company has, you know, insisted on is that there was earthquake, then a tsunami came in twenty, twenty-five minutes later,

• 1:46:13Speaker 06

  and then that water knocked out the electric grids and that's why you had um a nuclear meltdown. That is true for some of the reactors. Reactor number one, it was the earthquake itself which destroyed the piping, the forty year old piping in this reactor, a, a reactor that they had been warned many times before was, should have been decommissioned. And, and what's scary is that all of Japan's new, you know, safety regulations for nuclear reactors are predicted on the idea that it was a tsunami that caused the nuclear reactor, not the earthquake itself.

• 1:46:48Jack Murphy?

  So before moving on to some other things, I'd like to ask you to kind of close the loop on Goto and Saigo and tell us ultimately, where did both of these guys end up as far as we know?

• 1:47:03Speaker 06

  Well, Saigo passed away during the pandemic of COVID, um which was, which was sad.

• 1:47:12Speaker 06

  And I think, you know, uh, I think he had a heart attack.

• 1:47:17Jack Murphy?

  After he got back into, he got back into another Yakuza group, didn't he?

• 1:47:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, you, you know, they offered him, they basically came to him and said like, look, you know, your organization, um, which, you know, which was a huge organization, but gradually reduced, like, we need someone who has institutional memory and we need you to come back. Um, and we'll give you a promotion, uh, and put you in a position where you're insulated from going to jail. And he, and he took the offer and, you know, as someone who had left, but then faced, you know, the usual discrimination that all Yakuza face, even after they leave. I mean, I can't blame him, you know, I mean, honestly, if I was him and I had a choice of being, you know, the driver and bodyguard for me versus being a Yakuza boss and having someone open the door for me and drive me around,

• 1:48:04Speaker 06

  being treated like a big shot, I mean, ethical considerations aside, I'd probably say yes.

• 1:48:13Speaker 06

  I mean, you know, I was disappointed and we sort of had a falling out about it, but we we we made, we mended, so we stayed in touch. And, you know, I try and stay in touch with his son, you know, who's like all kids, he's really hard to get a hold of, but at least his son is doing all well.

• 1:48:32Jack Murphy?

  Good.

• 1:48:34Speaker 06

  And and as for Goto, the last I heard was that he is still still alive, getting a little senile.

• 1:48:44Speaker 06

  The United States listed him as a crime lord as late as 2015, even after he supposedly left the Yakuza and become a Buddhist priest.

• 1:48:55Speaker 06

  But, you know, we don't, we don't interact and, you know, I can't say I wish him well, but at least he's not in my life anymore.

• 1:49:05Jack Murphy?

  And you've kind of mentioned a couple of times through this interview about like where the Yakuza is today, what has been going on, that all this legislation came in. And now, if you're a member of the organization, you can't get an apartment, you can't get a cell phone, you can't buy a car. You know, people don't want to be like, you're treated like a leper.

• 1:49:28Jack Murphy?

  What has, what has the Yakuza become today and where do you see it going in the future?

• 1:49:35Speaker 06

  It has become

• 1:49:38Speaker 06

  a

• 1:49:41Speaker 06

  a traditional crime group that now will do anything it can to make money. The members still have to pay the association dues. And they're increasingly turning to crime like fraud, robbery, theft, whatever it takes to make the money.

• 1:49:58Speaker 06

  Some, some of the groups still survive because they have a well disguised, you know, racketeering going on, they're still getting

• 1:50:09Speaker 06

  payments under the table and providing the services that, you know, Yakuza have always provided protection and other things. I see them.

• 1:50:21Speaker 06

  Never completely fading out because if you completely get rid of the Okura, there's so many cops who don't have a job, right? So they want to kind of keep them at this level of, you know, of being powerless but not completely fading away.

• 1:50:37Jack Murphy?

  The cops found a way to get paid.

• 1:50:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, you always have, you need some kind of menace, right? To justify your existence.

• 1:50:49Jack Murphy?

  And so for you personally, I mean, the, the sort of conclusion of Tokyo Noir, you become a Buddhist priest. Tell us like how that came about? How did you become a holy man?

• 1:51:04Speaker 06

  Wow, I'm such a bad Buddhist priest, but I am keeping most of the precepts. Basically, um, you know, my landlord in college let me live in this Zen Buddhist temple for,

• 1:51:16Speaker 06

  you know, four or five years. And he's always been a supporter of what I've done and a, and a good voice and good advice. He's in, he himself has been really bad health since last year. I mean, um, which is really sad. Uh, he had got diagnosed with Parkinson's and, um, very late stage Parkinson's. So it's pretty severe.

• 1:51:38Speaker 06

  Anyway, uh, to a more cheerful story, uh, around 2017, I was working on a story about,

• 1:51:48Speaker 06

  a young baker who had basically worked himself to death and he was working for a very famous bakery. And I went to the funeral of the baker because his colleagues at work asked me to go. I was trying to write a story and it was a Soto Zen Buddhist funeral. And I figured it would be really, you know, if I, to talk to the families, like complete the story, it would be great to have an introduction via the priest that officiated the funeral. So I went to see Yogen-san, who is my Zen master, and I, and I explained the situation to him. I said, like, I'm working on this article about death by overwork. That's something that happens in Japan, actually, far too often. And I asked for an introduction to the priest who had officiated the funeral.

• 1:52:31Speaker 06

  And as we were talking, catching up, he said to me in his gravelly voice, like, you know, maybe it's time you stopped being a daredevil man whore and put your life in order and followed the noble path that you once were on when you were a student. And I was like, you know, maybe that's not a bad idea. And so we had this very long conversation and he basically said, like, you know, I don't have a disciple because I'm so cranky that no one can deal with me. And I don't have a son either, and you are the closest thing that I have. And it would be

• 1:53:10Speaker 06

  wonderful if you followed in my footsteps. And I said, after much discussion, I will think about it. And I said, if I were to do this, like, when would we do it? And he said, you should pick a date that's significant to you. I said, well, we could do it on my birthday, which is March 28. And he was like, that's amazing that, you know, your birthday is March 28. And I said, why? And he said, because that's when I took my Buddhist priest vows. And I kind of gave him that look like, yeah, you're like, you're full of shit. But, you know, like, I mean, in a, not in a sort of friendly, friendly way. And so he went up to his room and he pulled down this photo album of him when he was 15. And I looked at the year, it was the year

• 1:53:54Speaker 06

  Shoah 44, which in Western years, 1969. And I said, oh, like, wow, you became a Zen Buddhist priest on the day I was born. And he said, no, no, no, no, no. You were born on the day I became a Zen Buddhist priest. So it's karma. So you're meant to follow in my footsteps. And so I agreed. So, so I took the vows and I'm still learning the ropes. This is very military, I guess. If you don't, in my case, if I don't advance to the next level of spiritual development,

• 1:54:34Speaker 06

  if I don't rank up in the, in, in my Zen Buddhist priest ranking by 2027, I get kicked out. You either rank up or you, or you lose. And next year I have this giant test in which I have to solve this metaphysical riddle and, and, and defend my thesis in front of, in front of whoever wants to come to the temple. Really hard. And so I'm learning to do that. And, uh, you know, I can cook Buddhist vegetarian food. I can officiate some ceremonies. I'm very good at the one where you chase away hungry ghosts. So if you know someone who is plagued by hungry ghosts, because there's someone in their life who hasn't moved on to the other world, I can handle that. I'm very good at that one.

• 1:55:18Jack Murphy?

  Do you do Yakuza funerals? That's what I really need to know.

• 1:55:22Speaker 06

  No, no, I'm not doing Yakuza funerals. I'm not doing Yakuza funerals.

• 1:55:30Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Whoever received this interview, uh, I'm not qualified to do a funeral yet.

• 1:55:36Speaker 06

  Like, you know, because I, I really don't want that business. But if, if it's something more like your boss died and you feel he's like he's haunting the office, like I can deal with that. But the actual funeral service, no, can't, can't get them to the next life. That's not there.

• 1:55:53Jack Murphy?

  All right. So tell us about, uh, where you are now in this new book that you have coming out.

• 1:55:59Speaker 06

  Oh, wow. Thank you for letting me plug this. So this book, The Devil Takes Bitcoin, is about covering the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, which was in Tokyo. And in 2014, it collapsed with half a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin missing. And the CEO of this company was a French guy named Marc Carpaus. It's really unusual French guy who really loved, loves Japan, loved cryptocurrency. And basically created what was the epicenter of cryptocurrency world. Like if you wanted Bitcoin in 2014, Mt. Cox was the place to get it. But it's also just a chronicle of the history of Bitcoin and how

• 1:56:45Speaker 06

  And now, basically, criminal activity made it what it was.

• 1:56:50Jack Murphy?

  It was invented by an enigmatic Japanese guy, wasn't it? Like this dude that we don't really know much about.

• 1:56:58Speaker 06

  Satoshi Nakamoto, allegedly, right? Allegedly, a Japanese dude. And that's when the book also gets into that, because I didn't, you know, I didn't give a shit about Bitcoin in 2014. I didn't even know what it was until this Bitcoin, you know, exchange collapsed in Tokyo and it became like the center of world news because the Bitcoin prices plummeted. And the same year, Newsweek put out an article identifying, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto, the mythological creator of this Bitcoin. You know, this guy who created the cryptocurrency that's now worth billions of dollars.

• 1:57:37Speaker 06

  Newsweek identified him as this man named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, living in California. And my editor at The Daily Beast, you know, called me up, right? The editor-in-chief called me up and said, "If this is true, Newsweek has a tremendous scoop. But if it's not true, please kick their ass." And those two events sent me into four years of covering Bitcoin. And it's such a crazy story. And what's fun about this book is it becomes a sort of personal memoir, because, not that I ever intended to be, because as I was working on this story about this, the theft of half a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin,

• 1:58:21Speaker 06

  it turns out that there was someone else in the United States investigating this case who couldn't get any help from the Japanese police. And I was asked to smuggle the database of this exchange to the FBI in San Francisco. And that's one of the weird parts of the story, which I did. I don't know if that's, if that's a journalist-ly, ethically okay thing to do. But, you know, as I was working on the story and I began to think that maybe some of the people accused were innocent, I felt like that was the right thing to do. It's such a fun book to write and also to read, because even if you don't know anything about Bitcoin, you'll sort of be fascinated by how it evolved and how, basically...

• 1:59:06Speaker 06

  The Silk Road, which was an underground market where you could buy any, any drug you wanted online propelled it from nothing to a billion dollar currency.

• 1:59:15Jack Murphy?

  And when does the book come out?

• 1:59:18Speaker 06

  Book comes out on October fourteenth.

• 1:59:21Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so we're like, we're like a week out now.

• 1:59:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, uh, I'm happy to have a copy. This is, it came out a little bit earlier in Australia. This is the cooler cover, actually.

• 1:59:32Jack Murphy?

  Awesome.

• 1:59:33Speaker 06

  Like the guy in the hoodie.

• 1:59:35Jack Murphy?

  So people can go find that on Amazon or wherever books are sold?

• 1:59:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, and if you wanna, if you wanna send me a Bitcoin, like one tiny Bitcoin directly, I'll, I'll mail it to you.

• 1:59:49Jack Murphy?

  Uh, I think we have some viewer questions for you. Um, we'll get into here. What do we got, Dee?

• 1:59:58Speaker 04

  From Mark Corbin, we have, how did the Chinese Triads stand apart culturally when compared to the Akusa?

• 2:00:04Jack Murphy?

  Interesting.

• 2:00:06Speaker 06

  Okay, way out of my level of expertise, um, there's a guy in the Canadian, uh, in the Royal Mounties who's much better at this stuff. The Triads, um, have some of the same ritual that the Akusa do of succession ceremonies, that elaborate things that were, that were, um, relationships are cemented with, um, rituals invoking the gods, but that's about the only connection they, they have. The Triads and the Akusa don't work very well together, except for this one period of time when, um, uh, carmakers in Japan needed to,

• 2:00:47Speaker 06

  uh, it's not, what's not lithium batteries? Um, there's a part of the, of the electric vehicle, it's, it's a rare metal that is needed to make, um, uh, like a Prius and stuff. There was a time when there was a shortage of that and the Triads and the Akusa were working together to smuggle that material into Japan. That's the only case I know. Um, I, I'm not an expert on the Triads, unfortunately. Um, but they're working with the Akusa minimal.

• 2:01:15Speaker 04

  All right, we got a couple more. Um, how did you feel about the show's portrayal of your character and Ansel Elagort's, uh, performance?

• 2:01:25Speaker 06

  Ansel did a really wonderful job.

• 2:01:29Speaker 06

  I trained in Aikido with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.

• 2:01:34Speaker 06

  And I was never any good. Let me, let me get it clear. I've never been good at martial arts. I liked him, but I suck. And Ansel trained with the same school of Aikido, and he was really good in a short time. He did a really good job of getting in character. His Japanese is amazing. The only thing I didn't like about the TV series portrayal of me is that there's a scene where I'm doing meth with a Yakuza fan magazine writer, and I would never do meth, at least not knowingly. It's really a bad drug, which in general, I'm not, I'm not. I, I, I, if you want to do recreational drugs, I think that that's fine with them, but I don't want to do them.

• 2:02:14Speaker 04

  Got one more. How will the Yakuza plan to maintain their relevancy in current Japan?

• 2:02:23Speaker 06

  I, I honestly think that they're beginning to try and portray themselves as like a cultural tradition, like a Japanese living treasure. So like, you should preserve us because we're part of the lore of Japan. We're part of what attracts people to be here.

• 2:02:37Speaker 04

  Like the queen, like the queen in England.

• 2:02:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, like the queen in England, right? I mean, um, I.

• 2:02:45Speaker 07

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYPT, Eptinezumab, JJMR, an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults.

• 2:02:57Speaker 06

  Don't receive if allergic to VYPT. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure or color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions.

• 2:03:20Speaker 07

  Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vypt.com.

• 2:03:29Speaker 06

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• 2:03:54Speaker 03

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:04:00Speaker 06

  You know, this is really answering the question. I have so much material on the Yakuza. Like, I have their phone directories, I have comic books, I have, I have, you know, some of the embroidered outfits they have, like the sake bottle that they use for their ceremonies. Like, I've got all this stuff that I've collected over the years, like, in a warehouse in my second home in Kyoto, and I'm like, what should I do with this? Because it's, you know, 30 years of Yakuza fan magazines, like, like, no, I mean, I guess they're gonna open a Yakuza museum, if Japan will let me.

• 2:04:37Jack Murphy?

  Jake, is there anything else that I haven't brought up that you'd like to talk about before we get going tonight?

• 2:04:45Speaker 06

  Um, oh, I was gonna ask you, um, what is your tattoo? I mean, you know,

• 2:04:50Jack Murphy?

  Oh, I have, I have a bunch of, I have a bunch of Weeb tattoos. Uh, this is Ghost in the Shell from Masamune Shiro, and, uh, so is this one, and this one also. They're all from, they're all Ghost in the Shell.

• 2:05:05Speaker 06

  Oh, I love Ghost in the Shell. That's such a great, that's such, it's my absolute favorite one. I've watched all seasons of it. Even the really bad one they've done, Netflix.

• 2:05:14Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yes, that was terrible. It was terrible. We're gonna pretend that it didn't happen. Um, but, but, uh, Stand Alone Complex was great. The, the film, uh, the 1994 or '95 film, awesome. Yeah, I, I, in the comic book, the manga is also awesome.

• 2:05:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, Innocence, like, the second one, I think Innocence is the film title in, in, in English, is, is a little bit about human trafficking as well. I mean, that, that series has done some really interesting topics and things. Um, oh, I guess the, the last thing that we didn't talk about is that, you know,

• 2:05:52Speaker 06

  What separated the Japanese Yakuza from other mafia groups is, you know, is that they're, because of their public presence, they've always had more of a code of honor than other groups. And, and, you know, and mostly they're sociopaths, but some of them I at least respect to living up to the ideals that they profess. It's like, you know, a tiny fraction of them. But, you know, that is something that I think is unique about, about the Japanese mafia. And also, some of them write really great poetry. I like the, the poetry in the Yakuza fan magazine section says really funny and sometimes quite poignant. Who would have guessed?

• 2:06:34Jack Murphy?

  So there's some redeemable values there.

• 2:06:37Speaker 06

  Some redeemable values.

• 2:06:40Jack Murphy?

  So, guys, I hope you'll go and check out the books, Tokyo Noir, The Last Yakuza,

• 2:06:49Jack Murphy?

  and Tokyo Vice. And the new book coming out, Jake, is?

• 2:06:54Speaker 06

  The Devil Takes Bitcoin.

• 2:06:56Jack Murphy?

  Awesome. I'm looking forward to reading it. It sounds awesome.

• 2:07:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I will make sure we get you a copy, free of charge.

• 2:07:03Jack Murphy?

  Thank you. So Jake, thanks for doing this interview and, and sharing your experiences with us. This has been awesome. And having read your work, you know, back 15 years or whatever it was, I mean, it's awesome for this to all come together. And for everyone else out there, thanks for joining us tonight, and we'll see you next time.

• 2:07:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, thank you very much.

• 2:07:30Jack Murphy?

  Hey, guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House podcast, the Eyes On podcast, and the High Side news outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox, and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Eyes On and the Team House and whatever's topical or current on the High Side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you, as social media algorithms are pretty iffy, and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once a week email. It'll slide into your inbox, and it will have, you know, the greatest hits of that week. It's really good, man. I'm checking it out.

• 2:08:14Jack Murphy?

  The website for it is teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Go there and you enter into your email list or you enter your email into the little thing on the website and you're good to go and that'll be it. So we really appreciate your support and hope you'll consider signing up. Where's the link? The link will also be down in the description if you're looking for it there. And that's teamhousepodcast.kit, K-I-T, Kilo India Tango, dot com backslash.

• 2:08:52Speaker 07

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to V I E P T, Eptinezumab J J M R, an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive if allergic to V I E P T. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure or color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions. Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at V I E P T dot com. Say yep to V I E P T.

• 2:09:36Speaker 02

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• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:10:05Jack Murphy?

  Join.

• 2:10:13Speaker 07

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to V I E P T, Eptinezumab J J M R, an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive if allergic to V I E P T. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure or Color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions. Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at faipti.com.

• 2:10:57Speaker 07

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris mornings, pumpkin spice latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com, and download the app today.

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

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• 2:11:38Speaker 07

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to vaipti, eptinezumab, JJMR, an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive if allergic to vaipti. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating; if you have increased blood pressure, or color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions. Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at faipti.com.

• 2:12:22Speaker 07

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris mornings, pumpkin spice latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com, and download the app today.

• 2:12:46Speaker 03

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:13:00Speaker 07

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYAPT. Eptinezumab J.J.M.R. An IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive of allergic to VYAPT. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure, or color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions. Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vyapt.com.

• 2:13:44Speaker 00

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Crisp mornings, pumpkin spice latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players. A $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com, and download the app today.

• 2:14:09Speaker 03

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:14:21Speaker 07

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYAPT. Eptinezumab J.J.M.R. An IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive of allergic to VYAPT. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure, or color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions. Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vypet.com.

• 2:15:02Speaker 02

  Say ept to vype.

• 2:15:06Speaker 02

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• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:15:41Speaker 07

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying ept to vype. Eptinazumab J.J.M.R., an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive if allergic to vype. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure or color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions. Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vype.com. Say ept to vype.

• 2:16:26Speaker 02

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• 2:16:48Speaker 03

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• 2:16:56Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people 1 years of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

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• 2:17:56Speaker 00

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris Mornings Pumpkin Spice Latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over 1,000 different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players: a $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 2:18:20Speaker 03

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• 2:18:27Speaker 00

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